How IBM Brought Analytics to the Cloud

IBM's new private cloud environment for business analytics could be considered the culmination of IBM's overall strategy around analytics to this point.

IBM's new private cloud environment for business analytics could be
considered the culmination of IBM's overall strategy around analytics
to this point.
On Nov. 16, IBM announced its private cloud computing environment
for business analytics, which launches internally with more than a
petabyte of information, equivalent to 20 million four-drawer filing
cabinets filled with text, which stacked end-to-end would circle the
entire planet Earth. And to share the success models of this internal
project, IBM also announced a new solution for clients to build their
own private cloud environments based on this architecture, called IBM
Smart Analytics Cloud.

IBM Smart Analytics Cloud provides easily consumable business
intelligence services, systems and software to help customers create an
efficient delivery of shared business intelligence services across
lines of business and functional organizations, IBM officials said.
IBM's own Analytics Cloud deployment served as the template for this
solution offering, which features:

??Ã IBM services -
enables the client to transform the corporate business intelligence
(BI) strategy and achieve rapid return on investment with planning and
strategy sessions, installation and implementation of the Smart
Analytic cloud solution, as well as optimization of the cloud for the
enterprise
??Ã IBM Cognos 8 BI -
provides the BI capability for the cloud, offering a broad range of
business intelligence services, including reports, analysis, dashboards
and scorecards to monitor business performance, analyze trends and
measure results
??Ã IBM System z -
supports the foundation for the cloud with z/VM industry leading
virtualization running Linux on efficient "specialty engines" for
massive scale with resilient, secure, multi-tenant operations

Some IBMers my cringe at the use of the word "culmination" to
describe what the cloud analytics play means for the company's
analytics push, because there is so much more that IBM plans to do in
this space.
"'Culmination' makes it sound like there's nothing more...there will
be more around this in the first half of next year. That said, this is
certainly the result of many recent acquisitions," an IBM spokesperson
said.
Indeed, IBM's acquisitions of companies such as Cognos, RedPill
Solutions and SPSS, among several others have strengthened the IBM
business analytics portfolio, but the company is not done yet. IBM
intends to continue to seek dominance in this fast growing market
segment through both acquisitions and internal growth, Big Blue
officials said.
Ambuj Goyal, general manager, Business Analytics and Process
Optimization, IBM Software Group, said, "This is a trend for us. This
is not just an announcement; it's a journey for us."
Goyal, who has shepherded the business intelligence and analytics
acquisitions for IBM, said, "This is an example of how IBM's $6 billion
worth of R&D is coming together to further the company's overall
mission. We will continue to grow through both organic moves and
acquisitions."
For instance, SPSS had been a global leader in predictive analysis
with 20 years of experience before it became part of IBM, Goyal said.
IBM now owns all of that expertise.
Dave Laverty, vice president of worldwide information management
marketing at IBM, said IBM has expended its efforts across the company
to "help clients accelerate information-led transformation. Laverty
said IBM has made more that $10 billion in investments in information
management software, and has more than 4,000 global business service
analytics consultants.
Overall, the amount of time, effort, manpower and financial
investment IBM is putting into analytics is impressive, Goyal said. And
IBM Research deserves credit as well for enabling Big Blue to push its
analytics offering into the cloud, company officials said.
Steve Mills, senior vice president and group executive of IBM
Software group, said, "Our clients' investment in business optimization
projects is growing more than twice as fast as business automation."
Analytics play a key role in IBM's business optimization efforts.
Mils said he has noticed three trends that IBM is addressing:
workload optimized computing; workload optimized systems; and
simplified, unified infrastructure. Moreover, he said characteristics
of analytics workloads include search and query, predictive analytics,
and risk analysis.
Meanwhile, IBM customers say they welcome the analytics efforts.
Shirley Lady, vice president of Business Informatics/Blue Health
Intelligence for the Blue Cross and Blue Shield Association, said the
two biggest issues in healthcare are controlling the costs of
healthcare and maintaining the quality. Analytics can help on both
counts, she said.
"We're looking at various trends, such as utilization trends and
prevalence of diseases," Lady said. "We have an analytics data mart we
call ADAM. Since we added analytics capabilities, we have added fraud
functionality to the system to determine fraud aspects across the data."
Melody Playford, a data mining architect and manager of enterprise
solutions at the Dillard's retail department store chain, said
Dillard's has several projects going that require analytics. "In this
economy we have to look at closing under-performing stores," she said.
"So we looked at the performance of stores and also looked at our
customers to see if they were shopping our others stores" to determine
which stores could be closed with the least impact to the company and
its customer base, she said.
People are analyzing historic data to be able to discern what to do in the future," Goyal said.
Regarding the cloud scenario and analytics, Mills said, "We're
spanning the private cloud model where there is sensitive information"
that IBM clients will want to keep private. "But there is potential for
certain types of mixed scenarios where you can get a hybrid of public
and private cloud information."
"This is about unlocking the business value of information," Goyal
said about the analytics push. "If you're going to treat information as
a strategic asset, you need to do transformation projects. And to do
this we needed to build a service line built on consulting,"
IBM launched an analytics consulting services line in April of 2009.
"Our clients understand they're operating in a competitive
environment where more than ever before, in addition to being fast,
they have to be right. That requires something beyond the traditional
notion of 'sense and respond,'" said Frank Kern, senior vice president
of IBM Global Business Services, at the launch of the line. "That
drives the need to speed business decisions, understand the
consequences of any decision and predict outcomes with more
certainty-in short, moving to a new level of enterprise intelligence."
In addition, IBM has been opening a series of IBM advanced analytics
centers around the world to promote the use of analytics. Most recently
IBM opened an analytics center in Washington, D.C.
IBM said:

"The new IBM Analytics Solution Center in Washington, D.C., will
draw on the expertise of more than 400 IBM professionals. These will
include IBM researchers, experts in advanced software platforms, and
consultants with deep industry knowledge in areas such as
transportation, social services, public safety, customs and border
management, revenue management, defense, logistics, health care and
education. IBM also plans to add an additional 100 professionals,
through retraining or new hiring, as demand grows."

Darryl K. Taft covers the development tools and developer-related issues beat from his office in Baltimore. He has more than 10 years of experience in the business and is always looking for the next scoop. Taft is a member of the Association for Computing Machinery (ACM) and was named 'one of the most active middleware reporters in the world' by The Middleware Co. He also has his own card in the 'Who's Who in Enterprise Java' deck.